“Oh, wow! A bottle of gasoline!”
Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson
2026-04-01 05:06:01
2026-04-01 05:06:01
You have a complex mind and an achingly beautiful soul—but that’ll all be wasted if you’re not getting paid. I’ve learned to make four-plus figures a month by being deep in a marketable way, and now you can, too.
The algorithm favors images of faces, so emphasize your pensive pout from an angle that screams, “I’m gloomy, but also gorgeous. Sponsor me, lip-gloss brands, selfie ring lights, and Big Pharma antidepressants! I’ve got range.”
If you post enough pictures of yourself drinking DeTox, the unofficial hot beverage of influential people, Yogi Tea will read the leaves and finance you. Gandhi exclusively drank tea for part of his life, and look how many followers he had.
Keep your eyes slightly downcast in photos, as if whatever’s behind those lids has a story to tell. No one has to know that it’s a short story—a novella, really, about how you can’t finish your novel. This pose might help you land a publisher who can immortalize your introspective expression on book jackets worldwide.
Post vague quotes about self-realization that are universal but ultimately mean nothing. For instance, “Follow your own light,” with a picture of you holding an unlit match. Mention cutting toxic people out of your life (but don’t reveal that the people in question are your friends who, at lunch, discouraged you from posting that).
Carry around thick, intimidating novels. Quote Victor Hugo and insist that the Disney version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” really “got the ending wrong.” Everyone will be impressed that you read nearly a thousand pages about French Gothic architecture. An airline will fly you out to Paris to lead an “H.B. of N.D. Tour.” Quasi-modo; fully sponsored.
Change your profile photo to a picture of you as a child. It will remind people that you were once youthful, fragile, and adorable—and, heck, you still are. This might inspire family-friendly brands to consider you to be their parental spokesperson. Thankfully, having children is not a job requirement, but your inner child will rejoice at all the attention.
Learn two chords on the guitar, and humstrum Radiohead’s “Creep.” No one will believe that you’re a “creep” or a “weirdo,” but they will hand you a million-dollar record contract to support your “perfect body” and “perfect soul.”
Pose near large, endangered animals to remind the world of not only how physically tiny you are but also brave. Caption: “They must be saved.” It’s a call to action that conveys, If this image isn’t hearted immediately, you, too, might go extinct.
Redecorate your kitchen to look like it belongs in a Nancy Meyers movie: white linen everywhere, a wicker basket filled with dried daisies, and so many copper pots. Do not zoom out to show your disappointed roommate waiting to fill up her water bottle. Pottery Barn is standing by to support your soft life.
On social media, make jokes that don’t follow logic or build toward a punch line, but rather rely on jump cuts and endless captions. Invite people to your “bringer” show, and, if no one gets your material, just sigh and say, “It’s satire.”
Be hot. ♦
2026-04-01 05:06:01
The New Museum knows that most viewers will be of two minds about “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a blockbuster exhibition meant to crown the museum’s reopening after a sixty-thousand-square-foot expansion. With more than seven hundred objects, spread across three floors, the show is designed to both stimulate and fatigue you. The official remit is “what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.” In practice, this means a madhouse of multimedia rooms, packed with gurgling videos and useless machines and humanoid bodies. There are bodies made from scrap metal, bodies pierced with tentacles and affixed with screens for nipples and eyes, bodies broken down for parts, and walls lined with images of skin. In some rooms, paintings are hung salon style. In others, objects are suspended from the ceiling, mounted above doorways, or made to float via balloon. As if to poke fun at the show’s size and ambition, the curators have installed in the lobby a visual joke by the artist Ryan Gander: a tiny animatronic mouse.
Still, if we’re looking for “what it means to be human” today, the exhibition isn’t a bad place to start. It operates as a kind of encyclopedic junk pile, with hundreds of discarded visions of how technology might save—or estrange—us from ourselves. The first piece inside the galleries, a 1967 painting by the German artist Maina-Miriam Munsky, depicts a schematic outline of a cube struggling to contain a mass of dreamy flesh. It reads as a diagram of human folly: for centuries, we’ve tried to rationalize and control ourselves, only to be undermined by our excess and unreason. The show continually wobbles between these two poles. In the same room as the Munsky, in a section titled “Reproductive Futures,” a pack of Dadaists and Surrealists represents unreason, while the marvels of the rational are seen in a 1927 video of stickleback fish eggs by Jean Painlevé, a French photographer and filmmaker who trained in biology. In between are a bunch of mongrel appliances that leave both humans and technology worse for wear, like a computer, in a 2024 photo by Sara Deraedt, that seems to be giving birth to a wet child. The entire logic of the exhibition—with science and art, fresh names and familiar ones, lumped together—is here in miniature. Your job is to pick and choose your way through the heap.
The time line of the show starts roughly with the First World War, when new ideas about the human flourished around the killing fields of the Somme and Verdun. A series of lithographs from the nineteen-twenties, by the Soviet artist El Lissitzky, presents the cast of an opera as geometric puppets made of steely widgets, with Bolshevik-red organs—the body a cog readied for mass mobilization. A capitalist alternative is found in the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, an engineering couple who fastened little lights to workers’ hands and tracked their movements with long-exposure photographs, hoping to reduce motion and increase profit. Often, modernists didn’t have a coherent vision of the body so much as a criticism of it. John Heartfield and George Grosz’s “The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild” (1920) is a child-size mannequin spliced with odd prosthetics: a revolver for an arm, a set of teeth for genitals, a light bulb for a head, a fork for . . . well, I’m not exactly sure. The piece is half statue, half practical joke. The human becomes a palimpsest of all sorts of contemporary events and psychological possibilities: the soldier blown apart by mortar shells, the worker alienated from his own limbs, the man fearful of a woman’s dentition, the brain replaced by an electrical device. It can be bittersweet, the way a body is rarely just a body.
I almost missed “The Middle-Class Philistine” because of a Technicolor demon wriggling in the air nearby. “The Fireside Angel (Fourth Version)” (2019), by Cyprien Gaillard, is a hologram adapted from a 1937 Max Ernst painting, recalling Marshall McLuhan’s point that the content of a medium is always another medium. Less well known is McLuhan’s theory that art operates as a radar system for detecting disasters before they happen. I expected to see some warning signs in “New Humans,” but had trouble finding them. Hito Steyerl’s “Mechanical Kurds” (2025) shows footage of Kurdish refugees in Iraq who make poverty wages tagging and classifying drone images for Amazon (distinguishing whether something is a weapon, say, or a carton of milk); Sidsel Meineche Hansen has a video of a sex doll unboxing itself. The exhibition doesn’t offer glimpses of the future so much as glimpses of a world you already inhabit but would rather not.
The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size. Climbing the atrium’s stairs, you can look out the glass façade, onto the Bowery, or squint at the mesh panels that flank you, shimmering with green light and exposing the building’s internal supports. Architecture like this, which reveals its structure while producing its effects, can make a museum feel slightly more humane.
Unfortunately, when you reach the third floor, the show starts to flail. To poke holes in the universalist pretensions of Cold War-era “human rights,” with its use of the white Western male as a stand-in for the species, the curators try to tackle post-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, plants, animals, and extraterrestrials in one swoop. This results in some head-scratching decisions, like putting a closed copy of Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” (1927) in a vitrine, along with issues of Fire!! and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, which sit there like mute tokens of Black intellectual ferment. Nearby are paintings of animal-human hybrids by the Danish artist Ovartaci and a 2022 video environment by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, which includes what appears to be footage of Tamil independence fighters and a deepfake of Kim Kardashian. If the framework of an exhibition is so baggy that it can accommodate any piece of art, with nothing resembling a principle of selection, it risks deteriorating into spectacle. Part of me wonders whether that’s the point.
Toward the end of the show, you’ll enter the “Hall of Robots,” which is sort of like a Universal Studios Hollywood tour, if it took place in a large intestine. More than a dozen robots and creatures are scattered on a pink carpet. Behold a model of the wrinkly protagonist from Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” or H. R. Giger’s alien from “Alien 3,” or a robot jogging in place with dumbbells. The most disturbing figure is a blond mannequin who seems to be hanging herself with a mirror instead of a noose. She has one bionic arm, wears silver Nikes and a sweatband, and is plugged into an electrical outlet, causing her right hand to periodically twitch. Somehow, “Glass Man” (1935), on loan from the German Hygiene Museum, in Dresden, with all of his internal organs visible, ends up being the most wholesome thing in the room.
The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once argued that “the lens”—from the telescope to the camera—was partly to blame for the decline of humanism. It allowed us to make large things that were far away seem close, and small things that were close seem large. It warped our sense of place in the universe. I can imagine a version of “New Humans” that would have tried to repair things, rather than cataloguing the various ways we’ve become shrinking adjuncts to our machines. But maybe the future no longer belongs to art. What is the subhead of the show—“Memories of the Future”—if not an elegy? ♦
2026-04-01 05:06:01
Louicius Deedson was nine years old when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, in 2010. He remembers running out of his family’s Port-au-Prince home as it crumbled behind him, and eventually taking shelter in makeshift tents that his parents and neighbors constructed in a nearby dirt field. Within three days, he told me, he and his friends had turned the field into a soccer pitch.
He was the best player in the group, rising through the ranks of the country’s youth-academy system. His parents sent him to live with a host family in the United States at the age of thirteen, but he kept in touch with his friends and family back in Haiti, speaking on the phone daily, describing his efforts to acclimate to American life. Deedson kept playing soccer, and when he was eighteen, he signed his first professional contract, with a club in Denmark. He called his childhood friends after every game, recounting his glories and setbacks. “Sometimes they make little motivational videos for me,” Deedson said.
At twenty, he made his début for Haiti’s national team, part of a generation of Haitian players who grew up away from their country, then came together to represent it on the international stage. Now, for the first time since 1974, Haiti’s men’s national soccer team will compete in the World Cup, which the United States is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada this summer. “To be able to put that flag at the best competition in the world, it’s something big,” Ruben Providence, a twenty-four-year-old striker whose parents migrated to France before he was born, said. “Haitian people have faced a lot of negativity.”
Nearly every player I spoke with keeps in touch with loved ones back on the island. Hannes Delcroix, a twenty-seven-year-old center-back, who was two years old when a family from Belgium adopted him, connected with his birth mother and cousins in Haiti several years ago. Duke Lacroix, a thirty-two-year-old full-back, whose parents had grown up in Port-au-Prince before migrating to the U.S., told me his “dream would be to play a match in Haiti” in front of his aunts and uncles. For Deedson, his dream would be to take the pitch for Haiti’s World Cup matches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in front of his childhood friends. But Haiti happened to qualify for the World Cup in a year when it takes place in a country that has banned Haitians from visiting.
“The ones that want to come do not have the visa,” Deedson told me. “For me, it’s sad. A lot of people would try to come if the games were in Mexico or Canada.” Haitian fans are used to travelling to watch matches. After the assassination of Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, left the country in the grip of gang violence, the team has trained and played its home games abroad, most recently in Curaçao. Last November, hundreds of Haitian fans made the trip across the Caribbean Sea for the national team’s biggest game in half a century. Filling the rows of blue bleachers on that warm and clear night, they waved flags, chanted songs, and bumped kompa. Les Grenadiers, as the team is often called, were in the midst of a magical run through the regional tournament that determined which teams from North America would earn a place in the 2026 World Cup. By the tournament’s final night, one spot remained up for grabs. To qualify, all Haiti needed was to beat Nicaragua. The game happened to be on November 18th, the anniversary of Haitian revolutionaries defeating the French Army in 1803 before declaring independence.
“I feel like everything was written: two battles won that day,” Garven Metusala, a twenty-six-year-old defender whose parents moved to Quebec before he was born, said. “Everyone just knew we were gonna qualify.”
Nine minutes in, Deedson cut across the edge of the box and unleashed a left-footed strike that found the back of the net, loosening nerves and igniting the crowd. Haiti held on for a 2–0 win. Some players collapsed onto the turf in joyful tears. Others sprinted to the chain-link fence surrounding the pitch to dance alongside their supporters. The CBS Sports announcer described the scene as “the stuff of football dreams.” While many of his teammates went out to celebrate, Deedson returned to his hotel to call loved ones in Haiti. In punching a ticket to the world’s most popular sporting event, Haiti’s players had staked their claim as underdogs in a competition dominated by wealthier nations—exactly the sort of Cinderella story that FIFA aimed to spur when it expanded the World Cup field from thirty-two to forty-eight teams, giving more countries “the chance to dream,” as the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, put it.
Never before in the history of the World Cup has a host nation barred tourists en masse from a participating country in the way the U.S. has done this year. In fact, FIFA rules prohibit “discrimination of any kind against a country, private person or group of people,” including on the basis of “national or social origin,” with violations “punishable by suspension or expulsion.” But over the past year, President Donald Trump has issued proclamations blocking tourist visas for passport holders from forty countries, “to protect the security of the United States,” including four with teams that have qualified for the World Cup: Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.
In addition to these travel bans, the decision to issue any visa is entirely at the discretion of the U.S. government, and Trump has made no secret about which arrivals he deems worthy. All told, Trump has restricted immigrant visas in some capacity from seventy-five countries, fifteen of which are sending teams to the World Cup. All of these teams are from Africa, South America, the Caribbean, or Asia —including perennial powerhouse Brazil, 2022 semifinalist Morocco, first-time qualifier Cabo Verde, and consistent contenders Colombia, Egypt, and Ghana. Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal, along with fellow World Cup qualifiers Tunisia and Algeria, are also among the fifty countries whose passport-holding citizens are required to pay a bond of as much as fifteen thousand dollars to enter the U.S. on a tourist visa.
Infantino cannot claim he didn’t anticipate the possibility that U.S. policies might come into conflict with FIFA requirements. When FIFA considered candidates to host the 2026 World Cup nine years ago, the President was Donald Trump, and Infantino acknowledged at the time that Trump’s 2017 executive order banning visitors from predominantly Muslim countries threatened to disqualify the U.S. from contention.
“It’s obvious when it comes to FIFA competitions, any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup,” Infantino said at a 2017 press conference, in London. A year later, Trump wrote a letter to Infantino saying that he was “confident” that “all eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination.”
Despite Infantino’s concerns, and before the Supreme Court had even issued a final ruling on Trump’s travel ban, FIFA’s voting committee awarded the World Cup to the U.S. While Canada and Mexico share in the hosting duties, seventy-eight of the tournament’s hundred and four matches, including the final rounds, will be on American soil.
Geopolitical tensions simmer in the backdrop of every World Cup. For the 1934 World Cup, in Italy, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini built new stadiums around the country to showcase the strength of his regime. When Argentina hosted in 1978, the military junta that had taken power two years earlier staged elaborate ceremonies as markers of the country’s stability amid growing evidence of violent political repression. When the U.S. faced Iran in the 1998 World Cup, after years of diplomatic tensions, President Bill Clinton said he hoped the match “can be another step toward ending the estrangement between our nations.” During the 2002 World Cup, fans across Africa celebrated Senegal’s upset victory over defending champion France, its former colonizer, as a symbol of liberation.
Over the years, FIFA has prohibited play for countries with government policies that violate the organization’s stated values, including South Africa during three decades of apartheid; Yugoslavia, in 1994, following United Nations sanctions during the Balkan wars; and Russia, after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. under Trump has faced no such consequence—quite the opposite. In the past year, Infantino attended Trump’s Inauguration, honored him with FIFA’s first “Peace Prize,” and, after a White House meeting, assured everyone that “America will welcome the world.”
In response to questions about the impact of visa restrictions on the World Cup, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told me that “America’s safety and the security of our borders will always come first.” The State Department did offer expedited appointments in the visa-application process for visitors with World Cup tickets, but the program doesn’t accommodate “foreign nationals who are otherwise not eligible for visas.” For countries barred from receiving visas, Trump’s proclamation only allows “exceptions for any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives.” The exception explicitly “does not apply to fans.”
But Issa Laye Diop, of Senegal, has applied for a visa anyway, telling me he hopes the rules change in time. As the president of le 12ème Gaïndé, a fan club for the Senegalese national team, he has attended all three World Cups for which Senegal has qualified in the past, in 2002, 2018, and 2022. This year, Senegal boasts a strong roster, led by the star forward Sadio Mané. “The whole country will apply for a visa,” Diop said. “Why not?” And, even if Diop’s U.S. visa doesn’t come through, he still has a chance to keep his streak alive: teams are guaranteed to play three group-stage games in their attempt to reach the “knockout” tournament, and, while Senegal’s first two games are in the U.S., its third will be north of the border, in Toronto.
Iran’s national team has no such luck—and faces far more difficult circumstances than any other participating country. All three of its games are in the U.S., raising ongoing questions about whether the players can safely participate under a host nation at war with their homeland. In a social-media post, from March 12th, Trump wrote that “The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety.” Iran’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said on state television that it is “not possible for us to take part in the World Cup,” and the government announced in a statement that it was prohibiting national and club teams from travelling to “countries that are considered hostile and are unable to ensure the security of Iranian athletes and team members.” Iran’s football federation requested that FIFA move its matches to Mexico, but FIFA denied the request.
“In Iran, nobody is thinking about football or any sports nowadays,” Aref Mohajeri, a sports agent for a firm that represents around fifty Iranian players, including dozens who remain in the country, told me. “But the World Cup is really important for our players.” For Iranian athletes who play in domestic-league games that aren’t broadcast internationally, the World Cup serves as a critical launchpad to impress international scouts. After the 2018 World Cup, five Iranian players signed with clubs in Europe, including the star forward Mehdi Taremi, who has gone on to have a decorated career in Portugal, Italy, and Greece. “The whole world, and a lot of coaches, are watching,” Mohajeri said. “That’s a huge advantage for players.” And it’s not just a bigger paycheck; signing with a European club now means escaping a war zone.
Within days of qualifying for the World Cup, in October, officials from the Ghana Football Association started meeting with diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Accra. Though the event was still eight months away, and Ghana wasn’t restricted from applying for tourist visas, the officials wanted to make sure they had “enough time to get our house in order,” Henry Asante Twum, the association’s communications director, told me. The visa applications for past World Cup hosts, he said, “were not as cumbersome as it is now.”
They submitted the names of coaches, trainers, doctors, equipment managers, and players—anyone who could end up travelling with the team. “Every single individual that we have pencilled down has a specific role,” Twum said. By late February, the Ghana Football Association had asked players to submit the names of every relative they might want to invite to games. Though the roster wouldn’t be finalized until May, and players didn’t yet know how many tickets they’d be able to distribute, Ghanaian officials wanted to play it safe: submit the visa applications as early as possible, and figure out the rest later. “So if you’ve got plans of bringing family, inform us before you make the squad,” Twum recalled telling the players being considered for the national-team roster. “Inform us now so we can begin the process.”
It’s not just legal documents. Trump’s policies have created uncertainty for players and soccer federations trying to determine whether they will be safe in a country where immigration agents are reportedly detaining even legal residents based on their appearance, along with other factors. “We are not expecting problems, but we are preparing for possible problems,” Thiago Freitas, who runs Roc Nation’s sports agency in Brazil and has a star-studded client list that includes Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior, told me. “A lot of athletes have in their families people with a profile, according to age or occupation, that often are rejected by U.S. authorities.”
When the U.S. hosted the Copa América tournament in 2024, under the Biden Administration, Freitas helped his clients with visa applications for their loved ones. The process involved preparing documents showing proof of employment or family ties that signal an applicant isn’t likely to overstay their visa. Of the fifty or so applicants, Freitas recalls at least two getting rejected. Both were childhood friends of athletes on the national team, and were unemployed and unmarried. Currently, the State Department’s guidance for the World Cup officially welcomes the “immediate relatives” of players from participating countries, a term that covers “spouses, children, and parents,” the State Department said in a statement. “Exceptions may be considered on a case-by-case basis as needed.” If an athlete wants to invite a cousin or childhood friend, Freitas said that he anticipates those applicants are “probably subject to the same criteria as everyone who comes into the U.S. now, and this could be disappointing, especially because some of their friends are as important as their family.”
This uncertainty is not promising for most countries that Trump has targeted with visa restrictions. But, for some, his mercurial approach to geopolitics might provide an advantage. Juan Pablo Ribadeneira, an agent who represents four players on Ecuador’s national team, told me he is relatively relaxed about the visa process because “Ecuador has a good relationship with the United States.” Trump recently called Ecuador, and its right-wing government, “one of the United States’ strongest partners” in the region.
Nearly everyone I spoke to—more than two dozen players, agents, fans, and officials from various national soccer federations—has a pending U.S. visa application or plans to submit one soon. Because of this, most spoke cautiously about American policy, fully aware that their fates could hinge on the whims of the Trump Administration. One player followed up after our interview to ask that I not use a line he said that mentioned the President.
Steven Moreira, a thirty-one-year-old defender on Cabo Verde’s national team, told me that he knew plenty of people who had waited all their lives to see their nation represented in the World Cup. On the night of Cabo Verde’s qualifying victory, Moreira recalled, players celebrated on a beach with crowds of fans. “You could see in their eyes how much it meant to them,” he said. “Like they forgot about everything else except how happy they were.” He said he hoped to see many of those fans waving their flags at Cabo Verde’s games in Atlanta, Miami, and Houston. “Everything,” he said, “depends on Trump.” ♦
2026-04-01 05:06:01
A few days into the war in Iran, I found myself in a long text exchange with a friend, taking note of which public figures had come out strongly against the U.S. invasion, and which had not. The list included some politicians, but we were mostly focussed on the pundits of the short-form-video class: Tucker Carlson, the military commentator Shawn Ryan, and so on. For those following news about the war on social media, this affinity network—all these different figures with their own little tribes—has been quickly replacing images of the war with commentary on it. Instead of seeing yet another bombed-out building, we were seeing these faces and listening to incendiary thirty-second clips from their respective shows. My friend and I were just idly chatting, really, but as I thought about all this coverage I was struck by how social it felt. It was like talking about sports.
In 1967, the theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord described a phenomenon that he called “the spectacle,” writing that it “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by the images.” What he meant was that life had become increasingly representational, captured through television and advertising. The ties that bound us together through work and through communal, lived experiences had been severed and replaced with a mere phantasm of connection. He was, in an aphoristic and admittedly melodramatic way, predicting the rise of social media.
One of the abiding contradictions I’ve tried to think through during the past few years goes something like this: we see everything now—the slaughter of children, the assassinations of political figures, the killings of unarmed people by police officers—but all of that witnessing has produced little in the way of clarity or effective political resistance. War is no longer sanitized in the manner that it was during the first Gulf War, which, as I’ve written in the past, was presented to American viewers as a “clean military-technology show,” and yet the ubiquity, these days, of violent and deeply upsetting footage hasn’t made war feel any more real.
This unreality, in which we believe that we’re going through history together by staring at the same things on our handheld screens, seems to infect everything. Consider the No Kings protests that reappeared this past weekend across the country. The generic and essentially uncontroversial slogan of “No Kings” has rallied a population itching for real connection with other human beings, specific differences be damned. But the gulf between that urge and political change suggests that the separation Debord wrote about is far deeper than we might want to imagine. “The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate,” he wrote. Modern forms of dissent, even when they entail real-world gatherings, rely on a feeling of connection through social media, which is why the urgency of such dissent often seems to dissipate even as the marching is taking place. We can still become collectively enraged at the sight of someone dying on our screens or at the flagrantly illegal actions of the Trump Administration, but once we find ourselves in the streets under a widely acceptable slogan, we discover that the years of being online have given us an image of political protest but little more than that. We feel a needed catharsis and connection but also the limits of what is possible in a separated and alienated population.
October 7th, and the decimation of Gaza, brought unshakeable images to screens around the world—of hang gliders, brutalized women in the backs of trucks, mangled children, flattened city blocks. The spectacle produced by the war in Iran has been, for distant viewers, comparatively familiar, almost generic. Similar images have appeared so many times that it’s become nearly impossible for many of us to know if we are looking at rubble in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria, Tel Aviv. The sameness of what we’re seeing has, in America, lowered the political stakes of war. Much of the public is still outraged about what’s happening, but I fear that two and a half years of images from Gaza may have built up a public immunity to the sight of smashed concrete and blown-up humans.
What happens when the spectacle of war no longer captivates the public? What happens when we can’t even muster the illusions of shared separation?
Strangely, as social media has moved from the text of status updates and tweets to short video, verbal commentary has actually grown more prominent and more viral. This is what led my friend and me to our idle accounting of new-media punditry. What’s shoved on our feeds is, increasingly, tight shots of people’s faces as they angrily decry one thing or another.
On this well-lit but warped stage, the act of politics changes, although not always perceptibly. Recently, Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned earlier this month in opposition to the war, went on Tucker Carlson’s show. Antiwar liberals, who might not agree with much of anything that Kent has said in the past, might still happen upon clips of that interview on social media and find themselves hoping that Kent acquits himself well, so that he might provide a convincing counternarrative to his fellow-travellers on the right to oppose further military action. This, in turn, one might imagine, could help pressure lawmakers to turn on Trump.
What’s striking about this train of thought, which is quite common among the terminally online—a population that is growing every day—is that it involves no actual agency on the part of the person tracking this Rube Goldberg political process. The viral talkers have become the measure and the expression of the public’s outrage, mediated through the algorithms of social media.
These are horrible conditions for meaningful dissent. Trump’s party controls all three branches of the government, but I suspect that another reason Trump and his Administration feel like they can do whatever they want without consulting popular opinion—or even really informing the public—is that they recognize, consciously or otherwise, that the American people, alienated and addicted to their phones, are currently incapable of organizing themselves toward significant political action. “The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn,” Debord wrote. “From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of ‘lonely crowds.’ The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.”
One could easily characterize the No Kings actions as simply more spectacle—drone shots of big crowds to feed the social-media machine. But I feel sure that most of the millions who marched this past weekend were not only looking for more capital within the viral economy; they were looking for other faces and voices that would remind them they’re not alone. This may be all that the protests can presently accomplish. But nothing is more important than remembering there’s life outside the spectacle. ♦
2026-03-31 08:06:01
Since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran, in late February, Pakistan’s government has emerged as a surprising broker of ceasefire negotiations. In addition to helping communicate some of Donald Trump’s demands to the Iranians, Pakistan has offered to host peace talks between the two countries, in Islamabad. It’s all part of the surprisingly warm relationship between Trump and Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Army chief, who, despite the veneer of “civilian supremacy,” is the most powerful man in the country. Munir has led the Pakistani state’s charm offensive, while cracking down on domestic dissent, and Trump has reacted positively. (The President’s relationship with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s biggest adversary, India, has cooled since Trump’s first term.) But can Pakistan really help broker peace, and what does its recent conflict with the Afghan Taliban, its onetime client, mean for the region?
I recently spoke by phone with Aqil Shah, the author of the book “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics In Pakistan,” a professor of political science at McDaniel College, and a visiting faculty member in the security-studies program at Georgetown University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Pakistan’s military won over Trump, how the military consolidated so much power in Pakistani politics, and what the collapse in relations between the Taliban and Pakistan’s military says about the country’s foreign policy.
How has the Pakistani military establishment been so successful at wooing the Trump Administration, and how has it inserted itself into negotiations to potentially end the war in Iran?
Historically, the Pakistani Army has been a fulcrum of U.S.-Pakistan relations. But the Pakistani-American relationship has waxed and waned over time. During the Biden Administration, Pakistan had become a virtual pariah in Washington, or had been reduced to a nonentity, as the United States left Afghanistan and saw India as a means of countering China. But I think it was really the Pakistan-India crisis in May of 2025, when Pakistan and India engaged in limited armed conflict, that changed things, because Pakistan openly embraced Trump’s mediation of the fight, whereas Narendra Modi and company bristled at it. India said there was no role for outside mediation because the Indian approach to the Pakistan-India conflict was that it was a bilateral issue. Whereas Pakistan, under Munir, cleverly tapped into Trump’s need for adulation and praise, and the Pakistanis called him a global peacemaker, and publicly nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has brought this up several times. He likes to say that Munir is the best field marshal, and he says that Munir told him that he saved millions of lives. So they basically, at the expense of India, have achieved something unexpected.
In terms of the conflict with Iran, Pakistan has always seen itself as a sort of leader of the Muslim world. And so it has used this opportunity, because of its relationship with Trump or privileged access to Trump, and the fact that it borders Iran and is also fifteen to twenty per-cent Shia, to try this balancing act. It has been done with deft diplomacy of some sort, but it’s really flattery as foreign policy.
The military has been the central power in Pakistan since the country was founded in 1947, but over the past few years it has imprisoned the former Prime Minister Imran Khan and taken an even more central and autocratic role. To what degree has that allowed the military to seize the initiative with Trump?
At the time of the India-Pakistan crisis, the military’s public reputation and legitimacy was quite low. There was an economic crisis, and there was naked repression. There had been a rigged election before that, and they had jailed Khan, Pakistan’s most popular leader. But the conflict last year was where Munir pitched himself or projected himself as the victor of that war. And that revived the Army’s, or at least Munir’s, legitimacy as the solid leader and national hero who had saved Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis think Pakistan won that war. So in that sense the crisis helped Munir consolidate his power. They were able to curb some of the dissent around Khan. They’d already crushed his party, but the criticism faded away, somewhat.
And I think the military has used that confidence that it gained from the war, both domestically, to further consolidate its power, and externally. After the crisis, Munir was promoted to field marshal, and he was then elevated to the new office of the Chief of Defense Forces, which basically gives him control over the entire military. And it was also that crisis in which they were able to really effectively endear themselves to Trump by anointing him as the global peacemaker.
Is there any danger for the Pakistani military in being seen as too close to a leader whose dealings with the Muslim world are probably not that popular in Pakistan, or has the distaste that Trump’s shown recently for India and Modi outweighed that?
I would say that, as far as domestic dissent is concerned, or the unpopularity of Trump is concerned, it seems like the military’s been able to mute much of the dissent. The India angle likely trumps that card, as does the idea of Pakistan as this indispensable power that is trying to help solve this U.S.-Iran war. The P.T.I., Khan’s party, has criticized Munir for cozying up to Trump, but at the end of the day foreign policy is the exclusive preserve of the military. And I think the military has really successfully pitched itself to the Pakistani public as this leader of the Muslim world—that it’s really Pakistan that’s the pivotal player in the region with the capacity, the willingness, and the power to punch above its weight at the expense of India.
One interesting aspect here is Pakistan’s relationship to Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and Saudi Arabia does not, Pakistan is a much poorer country and has, for a long time, looked to Saudi Arabia for financial assistance. How much do you think Pakistan’s relationship with Saudi Arabia dictates what Pakistan is trying to do here in terms of negotiations with Iran?
It’s crucial because, as you know, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement or defense pact, which, at least from what we know, establishes that if Saudi Arabia were attacked, primarily by Israel, Pakistan would defend it. And Pakistan has extended or will extend its nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia. So Pakistan is already in an awkward position because the Saudis are being attacked. And I think the worst nightmare would be for Pakistan to have to do something militarily for Saudi Arabia against Iran. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I think they want to avoid that and keep this relationship with the United States, but also try to make sure that this region is not unstable. They also don’t want to have to take sides in the Saudi-Iran conflict, in part, because of the population of Shia Muslims domestically.
Still, Pakistan is completely or largely dependent on Saudi largesse, and has been for the longest time. And so they are really trying to hedge and balance, to make sure that the economic benefits from Saudi Arabia continue.
But I imagine the economic costs of the war continuing are only going to get more dire for Pakistan, right?
Oh, yeah. Pakistan is almost entirely dependent on oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. So that’s obviously an economic choke point. And Pakistan almost defaulted on its international debt obligations a few years ago. So they’re not out of the woods economically. And the war is obviously going to make, or has already made, things worse because they had to raise fuel prices, which obviously hurts the people on the street, the daily-wage earners, and much of Pakistan’s informal service economy. So Pakistan’s role in negotiations is strategic geopolitically, but also clearly economic.
One thing that you did not mention about Trump’s relationship with the Pakistani government is the degree to which the Pakistanis are paying off Trump or people close to him. This is a situation where the Pakistani military—because of its control over the country—can do things for Trump that the government of Sweden or even India probably cannot. How much is this a part of what’s going on?
I think in addition to the charm and flattery angle, Munir and the Army have tried to pitch Trump on having a partnership between the Pakistani state’s crypto venture, and the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Munir also literally had a case full of minerals that he showed to Trump at the White House. So Pakistan is pitching itself as a reservoir for all these critical minerals or rare-earth deposits, and even for oil and petroleum. And they have invested heavily in lobbying firms that are very close to Trump and his allies and partners. Steve Witkoff was actually able to negotiate a deal to redevelop the Roosevelt, a shuttered hotel in New York owned by Pakistan.
So obviously there is the angle of them trying to exploit the pay-to-play nature of the Trump Administration as much as they can. I don’t know how much this critical minerals stuff is actually going to pan out, but Trump has mentioned this, and there’s been some movement with the Pakistani military’s so-called Frontier Works Organization, which does engineering and construction work. And Pakistan has joined the Board of Peace, which has a fee of a billion dollars. So I think it’s both the charm of Munir and the military, but also, if there is anything Trump likes, it’s enriching himself and his buddies and his family.
And, aside from the economic angle or financial angle, Pakistan also quietly handed over an ISIS leader who was involved in an attack when the Americans were leaving Afghanistan and was detained by the Pakistani military last Spring. Trump mentioned that in an address to Congress. And Trump likes wins.
Can you talk about the role Pakistan’s military plays in the economy?
The Pakistani military has always had a commercial empire, but a few years ago it established what’s known as the Special Investment Facilitation Council. The idea behind it is that foreign investment in Pakistan is subject to too much red tape, and this allows the Army to take the front seat and say, “If you want to invest in Pakistan, we are your one-window operation.” So all foreign investments, whatever trickles into Pakistan, are in the hands of the military, and the military’s also taken over mining operations in Waziristan. So in addition to its own commercial ventures, the Army has recently institutionalized its role in how Pakistan conducts economic relations and investment, meaning the Army’s really in the position to make these decisions.
And the civilian government is just completely dependent on the military for its legitimacy after the rigged election. It no longer pretends that it’s actually a civilian government. It’s very happy with the fact that the military’s been able to suppress Imran Khan, who was a threat to the ruling party, the P.M.L.N. And the P.M.L.N. Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has always been a pragmatic, let’s-work-with-the-Army guy. He’s happy to be in the back seat and let Munir drive foreign policy, but also economic management.
You mentioned that the Biden Administration had lost interest in Pakistan. The main reason the U.S. was able to ignore Pakistan during that period was because America pulled out of Afghanistan, in 2021. For twenty years, up until that point, America had been working together with Pakistan, in a flawed way, to combat the Taliban. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happened with Pakistan-Afghanistan relations since then?
Once the Americans left, if you recall, Pakistan really became the global cheerleader for the Taliban, going around the world saying, “You must accept this regime. It’s going to be inclusive. It’s going to blah, blah, blah, blah.” The fundamental problem here is that the Pakistani Taliban (T.T.P.), which launched attacks against Pakistan, and the Afghan Taliban, which Pakistan supported, are primarily two sides of the same coin. They have the same ideology. Yes, they have different structures and leadership, but the T.T.P. is now firmly ensconced in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Taliban is doing to Pakistan what Pakistan did to the Americans by giving the T.T.P. sanctuary. So the relationship has gone from “the Taliban have liberated Afghanistan” to “Taliban are terrorists and this is an open war,” and even talk of regime change in Afghanistan. And the T.T.P. has now used this safe haven in Afghanistan to launch massive attacks on Pakistan, and not just in the north but also in major cities like Islamabad.
This is a nightmare scenario for Pakistan. Pakistan’s previous policy, which was called “strategic depth,” was the idea that having Afghanistan with a friendly Islamist government in Pakistan’s back yard would dampen the influence of India, and it has backfired majorly.
Yes, although domestic terrorist attacks against Pakistanis have been going on for a very long time.
Yeah.
And Pakistan would always say that it was the Pakistani Taliban that was doing this, and this branch of the Taliban was bad, while their Afghan Taliban allies were not bad, which annoyed the Americans. It is incredible that now they’ve flipped and recognized that the two branches of the Taliban are allied.
The good/bad thing Pakistan was doing with the Taliban has completely collapsed, and now they’re saying that the Afghan Taliban regime, which they had supported, is a terrorist regime, and of course they have to say, “Well, it’s supported by India.” And India has cozied up to Afghanistan. But this is a mess made by Pakistan. You can’t burn your neighbor’s house or bomb your neighbor’s house and think nothing will happen to you. The T.T.P. has been fighting for some kind of Islamic Emirate in Pakistan and against the Pakistani Army for a long time, but after a school attack in Peshawar in 2014 things calmed down after the military cracked down. The real comeback for the T.T.P. came after the Americans left Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban came to power. That is when you saw a real spike in the level of terrorist attacks on civilians and soldiers within Pakistan. This recent spike, which is, I think, Pakistan’s main national-security threat right now, in addition to India, and is really about this relationship Pakistan cultivated with the Afghan Taliban that has basically backfired, with the Afghan Taliban now in no mood to give up its strategic allies for several reasons. The Afghan Taliban says to Pakistan, “Well, that’s your problem. We can facilitate the talks, but the T.T.P.’s not here. We don’t harbor them.” Again, it is the same thing that Pakistan used to say to the Americans.
This has also had a horrific human cost, correct? How many Afghan immigrants has Pakistan deported in the last couple of years?
About two million since 2023. Some of them don’t even know Afghanistan. They’ve been in Pakistan for almost two generations. Their children were born here, they had lives here, and you just tell them tomorrow morning you have to pack up and leave. So, yeah, the humanitarian cost is horrendous. The Pakistani government says that all these terrorist attacks are happening because of these refugees, like they are some sort of Trojan horse, and they’re Afghans, not real Pakistanis. So it’s punishing the refugees, the people who have been here for over two decades or three decades, to put pressure on the Taliban.
Do you sense anything in Pakistan’s current posture toward the United States or Afghanistan that suggests they’ve changed their mind about what Pakistan’s role should be in the world, or does this seem like just more of the same?
I don’t think this is a serious rethink of anything. Pakistan’s turn on the Afghan Taliban is a reckoning that didn’t come because of some deep internal strategic reassessment or something like that. The policies have been completely disastrous, and, because the Pakistan military is never held accountable for taking the country down the drain, it keeps repeating itself, right? It has really, really ruined Pakistan over the long haul in terms of its economy, in terms of its internal political stability, in terms of radicalizing parts of the population. And in terms of Trump they are smart enough to see the opportunity and grab it, but I don’t think this is really some sort of strategic pivot from what Pakistan is. ♦
